Why did you create this innovation?

We saw the critical need for modern curriculum, a basic education for every student to master 21st centaury skills and narrow the digital divide. Our mission is to inspire digital creativity, nurture students' proactive use of technologies for social good from a young age and advocating mainstream Computational Thinking education in formal curriculum for every student.

How does your innovation work in practice?

CoolThink@JC is an impactful large scale Computational Thinking education program in Hong Kong, a US$67 million funding project donated and created by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust since 2016. We convene the government, renowned educators, local and global institutions to systematically transform our technology education ecosystem with modern curriculum innovation and teacher capacity building. We push policy refresh to mandate CT education in school system, and our program has reached over 80% of schools (400 schools) in Hong Kong and our curriculum has reached to USA, New Zealand and Dubai.
CoolThink@JC is innovative for its vision and thought leadership in taking “Computational Thinking” on the center stage as the brand and priority to drive local and international adoption with a successful evidenced-proven implementation model for the world. We founded the first International Conference on Computational Thinking Education since 2017.

How has it been spreading?

We started a four-year pilot in 32 schools to prove our model works. Stanford Research Institute conducted a rigorous 3-year evaluation for the project and concluded that CoolThink students significantly outperformed their peers in other schools. We continued our phase 2 program in 2020 to scale out our impact. As of Sep 2021, we has reached 400 schools (~80% of total primary schools in HK) in 2021, half of them are teaching CT in their formal computing lesson in school. We have supported 16,500 students in 2016 to over 110,000 students in 2021. Our curriculum received ISTE Seal of Alignment Student Standard with full score in Computational Thinking and Innovative Designer category. We will continue to spread our program and curriculum to different regions.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

If you want try out our curriculum and learning materials, please register here: https://www.coolthink.hk/en/curriculum-for-all/